There are no Acts of Love, only Selves of Love

Her crying is wet, hiccuping; she stands at the bars of her crib and coughs out these glottal stops. Each one, another bubble of sadness floating out into the darkness. After a few minutes, the cries become more urgent, the sorrow more keen as if she is asking the dark ‘will no one come?’Her faith in us—the good forces in the world—rapidly ebbing. The screen on the baby monitor flickers on and subsides, flickers on again and, as the cries become a wail, stays on, filling the room with the garish color of periwinkles.

I roll over noisily to wake Gina. I tell myself I’d go in, but naturally moms are better at this sort of thing. She’s nurturing and calm. When I go in there, I only exacerbate the situation and then no one gets any sleep. This is what I tell myself anyway and I roll back over, sighing loudly and stretching. Gina wakes up all at once. She’s already been up twice and has just fallen asleep. It takes no more than a second for her to comprehend the scenario. The myrtle flower light of the monitor, the hiccuping wail, tinny through the monitor speaker, urgent through the walls and tremolo in the kitchen. She tosses back the blanket.

“Do you want me to go?” I ask in a bullshit way.

“No,” She responds, unmasking my bullshit by leaving the room before I have time to say anything else.

Her feet fall heavily across the small house. On the stove, the finger bowls of salt and pepper rattle a little. The candles and picture frames on the bookshelf knock together with a castanet clicking. I wonder if this is her way of letting our daughter know she’s coming. The wail does not diminish. If anything, it becomes even more urgent and then, after the door to the small bedroom with leopard removable wallpaper and a bookshelf full of board books about going to sleep opens, the wail goes back to a hiccuping cry and even from across the house, I can hear how she’s raised her little arms up in her crib to be lifted away from the dark sadness. And once she is lifted, her crying quiets and stops. She wants such a simple thing: to not be left alone because she is very small and unfamiliar with the learned response to solitude and quiet and darkness. For her I know each moment passing in the dark alone must feel impregnated with all of time itself. I remember, even at six or seven lying in my bed and thinking through the dark and quiet until it began to feel like everyone I loved was gone, that the dark had swallowed them and it felt so terrible tears would roll down my checks and I would think ‘my poor mom’ over and over, seeing her gone and then it would occur to me that if I went to her room and just saw she was still there, I wouldn’t have to worry and when I crossed the hall and saw her sleeping, I knew everything was fine, that tomorrow would come as sure as the previous day had. But what did I do before I could get up? Before I could move across the house and make sure my mom was still there? Did I lie there and cry and wail, bouncing up and down in my crib, waiting through dark hours for someone to come and prove the world was still there? What agony to be so long in suspense and then what torture to be so long certain.

The house has gone quiet and I roll back over and sleep. When Gina gets back into bed 10 minutes later, I don’t wake up. But when the cries start hiccuping again and the light of the monitor flares up, I wake up and become restless. I lie there listening, seeing my daughter’s tear-streaked face and her little hands clenching the top railing of the crib. I’m feeling more awake, even to be woken up three times and go back to sleep starts to compromise the quality of my rest, though I’m the lazy one. I pull my courage together and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

“I’ll go,” Gina says, coming up from the bed by straightening her arms, pushing down on the mattress.

“Are you sure?” I ask, already starting to swing my legs back into bed. And she goes, but this time I don’t fall asleep again. I lie there, listening to the cries mellow into quiet thinking about these two people I love, how they’re suffering for each other and how I don’t figure into the situation. How this is the role of dads everywhere, to go back to bed, to only emerge when the situation is resolved or has become completely untenable and no one can sleep. My family needs me and I’m just lying here, preserving myself for work, following the American mantra that doing is all that matters and my ‘doing’, as the man, is not here but at work.

I’m groggy, but no longer tired. It’s almost six. I get out of bed, go out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. In the living room, Gina is lying on the floor, half asleep and my daughter is in her room happily pulling all her books off the bookshelf, one at a time, throwing them behind her with no concern for where they land. I tell Gina to go to bed, to try to get a little sleep before the morning, although I know she won’t. It’s too late for that, but maybe next time I’ll get it together a little earlier.

My daughter hears me and drops her last book before crawling over in her quick and somewhat floppy way. I reach down and pick her up. The tears on her face have dried, but her eyes are still a little glassy and her palms are wet, though it’s difficult to tell if it’s tears or sweat that’s moistened them. Almost as soon as I pick her up, she starts wriggling to be put down and I follow her over to another pile of books she starts to go through. She throws them and laughs now that I’m watching.

Gina goes to bed and I pick my daughter up from her books and show her how to grind coffee and pour the hot water into the press. She watches with sleepy attention. Then we go back to the living room to read and watch the sun come up through the windows and as she turns the pages of the book we’re reading, I’m glad to have woken up, to be here for this moment of being, as spending time with my daughter, no matter how early in the morning, is the only part of my day this isn’t ‘doing’. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known that is fulfilling without an associated sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing to be ‘done’ we just ‘are’ together.

Maybe Gina and I are spoiling our daughter by getting up with her in the night and not letting her cry by herself in the dark hours that are so much darker and longer for her. Maybe we’re not properly preparing her for the rigors of life. For now, I am happy to make the sacrifice to spare her the discomfort of the sadness of being apart from the ones you love. It seems like too grievous a thing to be insisting a baby learn so young and she’s so happy now, playing with these books. How can I deny her when all she wants is to not be alone? Why does she need to learn this terribly American skill at all? Why do we place so much value on the individual? Because their support will one day fade away? Should we not love our daughter to the full extent of our ability because one day we will die and no longer be able to actively supply her with this love? No. Even if I can’t always get myself out of bed, I will always want to go to her, to alleviate her suffering. Nothing could change that. Nothing could undo it.

After an hour, Gina wakes up and in the roseate light of the early morning, the three of us ‘are’ together. We sit there, together, not entirely awake, and relish the opportunity to be without doing. Later the light will spread across the fields and make its customary demands for the day, but for now there’s nothing to accomplish, but so much to be.

Dark Streets, Bright Waters

The generator came on sometime in the middle of the night. Although the power had gone out for the rest of the area, our landlord’s foresight had saved us from sharing the darkness that swelled outward from the town. The bright gibbous moon made the sky brighter than the clusters of buildings and homes that seemed to absorb light without returning any, making the darkness we actually live under apparent. In the light of the moon, the dark buildings looked cold and hunched over.

In the morning, I woke up late and the sun was shining across the fields that can be seen from my bedroom window. The dew had dried up and the cows were tearing at the grasses.

PG&E said they turned the power off as a wilfire precaution in the severe winds. We turned on the radio and checked the local websites while we made coffee. The consensus was this was a quid pro quo with PG&E’s line being ‘You sue us for the fires last summer, we make sure it doesn’t happen again by shutting off the power. Sorry for the inconvenience.’

There was no inconvenience for me. In the middle of the week, I had the day off. I could relax, catch up on work and spend time with my family. After coffee, we set out toward downtown to see if anything was open.

More cars were on the streets than there would’ve been on an average Wednesday morning. There was at once a stillness and a hurried quality in the air, like the little whirs and hums all that electricity produces had to be replaced by something, so everyone got in their cars and started driving. But the noise wasn’t complete. It wasn’t the sound of a town, but more like a country field a tractor has just rolled through. Despite the drivers’ efforts, the silence seemed to be rising.

The first businesses on 11^th st. were closed, but when we rounded the corner to I st. we noticed the bagel shop was open. The wire bins, normally stocked with bagels were empty and the production area behind the counter was dim, the mixers and ovens still and cold. The only thing they seemed to be selling was coffee, but the people who’d bought some, didn’t look at all concerned by the lack of bagels and they sat on the front patio sipping their drinks contentedly and watching passersby with that kind of open, bovine way cafe patrons often do.

The Co-Op parking lot was full. Surprised to see it open, we headed for the door. The place was so dark, I expected to be turned back, but we walked in and were soon in conversation with a clerk who told us that they’d be open as long as there was daylight and that all the refrigerated stuff was all half off. The place was a little warmer and smellier than usual—especially near the cheese display—but no one seemed to mind and despite the empty shelves and dimness of the aisles, people shopped as they would on any other day. In the refrigerated section, realizing how cheap 50% off made everything, I complained about not having brought the car, with our generator, we really could’ve cashed in. But even then, I don’t know that I would’ve bought much more than I did. The ice cream was probably already pretty melty and I didn’t want to be the guy throwing panicked armloads of food into his cart, even if only to save money.

We bought enough for a nice breakfast and walked back home. The streets of town were cushioned with the quiet of a snowfall even in the radiance of the October sun. Many stores were open, only accepting cash and illuminated with daylight. I stopped into the bookstore and the dusty creak of the floorboards and the chill shadow at the back of the store where the light didn’t quite reach gave the impression of a dry goods store 100 years ago.

…

In the evening, I went for a bike ride to the next town over. I wanted to see what nightfall looked like when the lights over the car lots and the drive-throughs were all off.

I rode west out to the ocean and then returned east with the smoldering sun already under the horizon behind me and the stars beginning to shine over the mountains. The streetlights were off. The traffic lights were off; it looked like the whole town was camping. The usual amount of traffic was on the streets, but it was hard to imagine where anyone could be going. Nothing was open. I rode past homes to find most people sitting in their cars, the weird blue light of their phones coldly illuminating their faces. I didn’t see a single candle, nor a lantern. The houses were completely darkened except those—and they were rare—that had a noisy gas generator roaring in the front yard. It looked like some kind of exodus, like everyone had decided to take to their cars and give up their homes, but now that they’d done so, realized they had no where to go.

Noticing some cars in the Safeway parking lot, I turned in. There was only one feeble light radiating from just inside the propped open door, but people came and went as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The parking lot was so utterly steeped in darkness, it would’ve been possible to bump into someone before you saw them coming. Even the headlights of the entering/exiting cars did little to brighten the scene but, rather, seemed only to expose the profundity of the darkness.

Once again, I expected to be turned away at the door. Only one was open and an employee was standing there like a sentinel. I quickly walked in past the rows of checkout counters and found myself in thorough darkness. The shelved items blocking out most of the residual light from the front of the store. Shoppers walked around with the flashlights on their phones. Either they had over-flowing carts or carried only one or two items. There seemed to be only two classes of shoppers. Those who were there for novelty of shopping in the dark and those who were there to clean off the shelves. It would’ve been very easy to steal, but there was so much trust, so much goodwill in keeping your doors open after sundown and such a wholesome joy in the kids giggling and trying to scare each other it would’ve taken some extraordinary need to steal, perhaps Safeway was counting on this. As if to highlight this sense, the customer and the clerk in front of me were talking about little league baseball games and while I waited, I watched three or four families with five or six kids a piece come through the door like they were entering the doors of a fun house. The transformation of the ordinary was better than a spectacle that set out to be extravagant. Everyone, even the adults, seemed pleased with this result.

Back out on the street, the moon was up and, again, the town was darker than the mountains and the sky overhead that reflected the moon light more than the buildings and streets. I rode past a few more people sitting in their cars staring into the blue light of their phones, radios turned up against the silence. The brightness of the moon only increased as I rode back out toward the ocean, into the fields, away from the dark, furtive town.

I crossed the Mad River and, looking down in the moonlight, I saw three river otters, a family, unperturbed by the blackout, splashing in the silver moonlit waters, gleefully enjoying what, to them, was surely a very bright night. I watched them until they splashed up the river and out of sight and then continued riding back to the darkness on the horizon that marked the next town and my home.